1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to computer software and, more specifically, to methods for accessing information via the Internet. Even more specifically, the present invention relates to coordinating speech and visual web browsers.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet is a global network interconnecting the computer networks of universities, private organizations, corporations, and governments, as well as individual's computers. One segment of the Internet is referred to as the World Wide Web (WWW) or simply ‘the Web.’ One description for the WWW is a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”
As the WWW and Internet grow, and more information becomes available through them, they become increasingly more important to corporations and individuals alike. Furthermore, the WWW is proving to be an extremely valuable resource for corporate enterprises for communicating via electronic mail (e-mail), for accessing information on-line, etc.
Currently, information on the WWW and Internet is typically accessed by means of web browsers, such as Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. These web browsers typically employ a Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) to transfer Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) documents from a web server to a client data processing system.
Most of these web browsers are visual in character. That is, information is provided to a user via a visual display, and requests for information are entered by typing or otherwise manipulating the display using a pointer positioning device, such as a mouse. However, a more recent method of accessing information via the Internet or WWW is the use of speech browsers. Speech browsers speak the content of a web page and then listen for user commands in order to direct the browser to make additional page requests. One markup language understood by speech browsers is Speech Markup Language (SML). It describes what should be spoken and how to speak it, and also what user commands should be listened for. Audio information contained on a web site is returned to the speech browser and broadcast to the user via an audio speaker.
Currently, visual web browsers do not have integrated speech recognition, and speech recognition engines cannot be used to navigate visual web pages. However, personal digital assistants and other similar devices are becoming more popular, and people are desiring to access the Internet and WWW from a wider variety of places where full-size computers with keyboards are not available or feasible. Therefore, the need to integrate speech browsers with visual browsers, so that visual information can be displayed in response to oral requests, becomes more and more important. However, this is likely to be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Therefore, it is desirable to have a method of rapidly providing a basic level of coordination between existing visual and speech browsers.